There exists a global system of interconnected computer networks through which information stored on one computer can be requested by and transmitted to another computer. This global system of interconnected computer networks, known as the Internet, and the methods by which information is requested and transmitted, was originally developed through funding from the Advanced Researched Projects Agency, a branch of the United States government, in the 1960s. Over time, software developers utilized the Internet as a framework upon which to develop software for specific purposes and to transmit information for each purpose in a particular way. These methods of communication were and are still known as protocols. For instance, the transfer of a file from one computer to another took place in the file transfer protocol (“FTP”). Software that mimicked the way mail is sent from one person to another person, but in an electronic form, operated using the simple mail transfer protocol (“SMTP”).
In the 1990's scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (“CERN”) developed a framework for storing, requesting, and transmitting information in what is known as the hypertext markup language (“HTML”) and the corresponding hypertext transfer protocol (“HTTP”). This system is built on top of the communications framework of the Internet. The core feature of this particular system is to store and present documents (“webpages”) in an electronic form that contains references (“links”) to other such documents. Each link contains a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) which essentially is the address, in the HTTP format, of a particular document being linked to. From a topology perspective, the system of documents or files (again, “webpages”) and the computers containing or hosting the collections of documents (“websites”) formed a web, and the system was appropriately named the World Wide Web (“WWW”) or Web, for short.
The software for viewing and requesting the information available on the World Wide Web began as crude text-only programs called web browsers. Though the early web browsers fulfilled the function of allowing a person to move from one document to another, through links, the ability to display non-text information, such as pictures, inline with the text was unavailable.
In 1993, a student at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen developed a landmark web browser called Mosaic that included the ability to show pictures in-line with the text of a document. Later Marc Andreessen, and entrepreneur, Jim Clark, formed a company called Netscape Communications Corporation (“Netscape”). Netscape developed an improved web browser along with a protocol, the secure sockets layer (“SSL”) for communicating sensitive information in a secure manner, as well a programming language known as JavaScript, which could be included in the HTML of a webpage to give the webpage more functionality.
Netscape's web browser popularized the World Wide Web because of the rich manner in which webpages could be presented. Businesses formed around the World Wide Web, offering all manner of services, and the amount of information stored on and accessible through the World Wide Web increased dramatically.
Identifying the need for technology to catalog and organize the developing body of information on the World Wide Web, companies such as Yahoo! Inc. developed computer programs that would seek out the information available on the World Wide Web by methodically copying the content of webpages stored on websites and index this content in their own databases. Early efforts at cataloging the information on World Wide Web resulted in webpages that presented a directory of broad topics, each of which was a link to another web page with more specific topics. By traversing through the directory structure, a person would eventually be led to a specific webpage. Later, companies such as Google, Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. developed systems and methods for determining the relevance, represented by a numerical score, of the content of any webpage with respect to a given keyword or set of keywords. The ability to assign a score to the relevance of a particular webpage to a keyword or set of keywords made it possible to rank webpages by their relevance to any given keywords. Systems with this capability came to be known as search engines. Search engines allow a person (the end user) to view the webpage of a company running a search engine, submit a keyword or set of keywords, and receive a listing of webpages (“search results”) ranked by their relevance to the keyword(s). Each item in the list presented to the end user includes a link to a webpage, so that simply clicking on the item in the list causes the web browser to request, receive, and present to the person, the content of the webpage.
The above-described method of ranking search results by the relevance of the content of webpages to given keywords has come to be known in the art as organic or natural search results. Another method of ranking search results that is commonly employed by companies running search engines is known as sponsored or paid results. Using the sponsored-results method, search engines present search results based on the financial arrangement a website owner has made with the company running the search engine to associate a webpage with one or more keywords.